Photoshop Action Basics

We have a short video tutorial that walks you through the steps below. Check it out!

Running An Action

To run an action, you’ll need to access the actions palette. Normally it lives on the right side of your screen, with the other palettes. In normal view, it looks like this:

The folder icon represents an action group (like Caffeine Jolt in the example above). To run an action, just click the action’s name, and press the Play button at the bottom of the actions palette.

Button Mode

Once you’ve got the actions installed, we recommend putting the actions palette into button mode. To do this, make sure your actions palette is visible, and then click on the actions palette menu button, in the top-right of the palette.Click “Button Mode” from that menu.

You should now have a very pretty, color-coded list of actions. To run one of the actions, just click on it. Let it run through to its completion, since stopping an action in the middle of running will cause it to run incorrectly the next time you play the action.